forgejo/CONTRIBUTING/WORKFLOW.md
Loïc Dachary 6b8e6878c9
[DOCS] CONTRIBUTING
Refs: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/8
Reviewed-on: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/pulls/153
Refs: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/123
Reviewed-on: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/pulls/299
(cherry picked from commit 08dcef0c8c)

[DOCS] CONTRIBUTING/RELEASE: https://forgejo.org/docs/admin

Because the version is not displayed on the landing page of Forgejo,
there cannot be a link to a versionned documentation. There must exist
a link that points to the latest version on the website for the
forgejo instance to display.

Better but more complicated approaches could be to:

* Embed the documentation in Forgejo
* Allow the admin to not display the help
* Allow the admin to display a versionned help or not

(cherry picked from commit 83cc389239)
(cherry picked from commit 5df52b8a4f)
(cherry picked from commit 9a66b3d70b)

[DOCS] CONTRIBUTING/RELEASE: reminder to update FORGEJO_VERSION

(cherry picked from commit 2a4d0bd164)
(cherry picked from commit 6577fad1c9)
(cherry picked from commit d5b78a53fe)
(cherry picked from commit ddc09375ca)
(cherry picked from commit 06015101a1)
(cherry picked from commit 9c7208b3f6)
2023-05-02 13:39:42 +02:00

8.1 KiB

Development workflow

Forgejo is a soft fork, i.e. a set of commits applied to the Gitea development branch and the stable branches. On a regular basis those commits are rebased and modified if necessary to keep working. All Forgejo commits are merged into a branch from which binary releases and packages are created and distributed. The development workflow is a set of conventions Forgejo developers are expected to follow to work together.

Discussions on how the workflow should evolve happen in the isssue tracker.

Naming conventions

Development

  • Gitea: main
  • Forgejo: forgejo
  • Feature branches: forgejo-feature-name

Stable

  • Gitea: release/vX.Y
  • Forgejo: vX.Y/forgejo
  • Feature branches: vX.Y/forgejo-feature-name

Soft fork history

Before rebasing on top of Gitea, all branches are copied to soft-fork/YYYY-MM-DD/<branch> for safekeeping. Older soft-fork/*/<branch> branches are converted into references under the same name. Similar to how pull requests store their head, they do not clutter the list of branches but can be retrieved if needed with git fetch +refs/soft-fork/*:refs/soft-fork/*. Tooling to automate this archival process is available.

Tags

Because the branches are rebased on top of Gitea, only the latest tag will be found in a given branch. For instance v1.18.0-1 won't be found in the v1.18/forgejo branch after it is rebased.

Rebasing

Feature branch

The Gitea branches are mirrored with the Gitea development and stable branches.

On a regular basis, each Feature branch is rebased against the base Gitea branch.

forgejo branch

The latest Gitea branch resets the forgejo branch and all Feature branches are merged into it.

If tests pass after pushing forgejo to the https://codeberg.org/forgejo-integration/forgejo repository, it can be pushed to the https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo repository.

If tests do not pass, an issue is filed to the Feature branch that fails the test. Once the issue is resolved, another round of rebasing starts.

Cherry picking and rebasing

Because Forgejo is a soft fork of Gitea, the commits in feature branches need to be cherry-picked on top of their base branch. They cannot be rebased using git rebase, because their base branch has been rebased.

Here is how the commits in the forgejo-f3 branch can be cherry-picked on top of the latest forgejo-development branch:

$ git fetch --all
$ git remote get-url forgejo
git@codeberg.org:forgejo/forgejo.git
$ git checkout -b forgejo/forgejo-f3
$ git reset --hard forgejo/forgejo-development
$ git cherry-pick $(git rev-list --reverse forgejo/soft-fork/2022-12-10/forgejo-development..forgejo/soft-fork/2022-12-10/forgejo-f3)
$ git push --force forgejo-f3 forgejo/forgejo-f3

Feature branches

All Feature branches are based on the {vX.Y/,}forgejo-development branch which provides development tools and documentation.

The forgejo-development branch is based on the {vX.Y/,}forgejo-ci branch which provides the Woodpecker CI configuration.

The purpose of each Feature branch is documented below:

General purpose

Dependency

  • forgejo-dependency based on forgejo-development Each commit is prefixed with the name of dependency in uppercase, for instance [GOTH] or [GITEA]. They are standalone and implement either a bug fix or a feature that is in the process of being contributed to the dependency. It is better to contribute directly to the dependency instead of adding a commit to this branch but it is sometimes not possible, for instance when someone does not have a GitHub account. The author of the commit is responsible for rebasing and resolve conflicts. The ultimate goal of this branch is to be empty and it is expected that a continuous effort is made to reduce its content so that the technical debt it represents does not burden Forgejo long term.

Privacy

Branding

Internationalization

Accessibility

Federation

Pull requests and feature branches

Most people who are used to contributing will be familiar with the workflow of sending a pull request against the default branch. When that happens the reviewer should change the base branch to the appropriate Feature branch instead. If the pull request does not fit in any Feature branch, the reviewer needs to make decision to either:

  • Decline the pull request because it is best contributed to Gitea
  • Create a new Feature branch

Returning contributors can figure out which Feature branch to base their pull request on using the list of Feature branches.

Granularity

Feature branches can contain a number of commits grouped together, for instance for branding the documentation, the landing page and the footer. It makes it convenient for people working on that topic to get the big picture without browsing multiple branches. Creating a new Feature branch for each individual commit, while possible, is likely to be difficult to work with.

Observing the granularity of the existing Feature branches is the best way to figure out what works and what does not. It requires adjustments from time to time depending on the number of contributors and the complexity of the Forgejo codebase that sits on top of Gitea.